Stuart Oetzmann is a happy man, as contented as one of his happy Gloucestershire Old Spot piglets in the proverbial. And it’s all down to his new stylish epicurean address, the Metfield Café at Snape Maltings, that splendid Suffolk shopping-leisure-cultural emporium set in all its rustic reed-bed glory on the banks of the river Alde. The Gooderhams’ latest phase to rejuvenate this impressively imposing pile (once one of the UK’s largest flat floor maltings) has been to build a collection of townhouses and apartments as well as giving much more space over to their high brow lessees at Aldeburgh Productions making the Snape Maltings Concert Hall and the extended studio complex a European ‘creative centre for music excellence’.
Aiming just as high on site in his own inimitable virtuoso performance, Stuart’s chic but relaxed ‘eatery’ is striding its own path, opening to foodie acclaim last September in a contemporary mezzanine overlooking the House and Garden store at the heart of the building. Stuart’s geniality and trademark relaxed yet impassioned manner belies his achievements, his business quickly evolving from making pork pies renting space in someone else’s bakery seven years ago to having five different businesses including another farm on the way. The building block of the group is the Metfield Bakery now based in Dereham in West Norfolk, which he bought a few years ago to merge with his existing artisan bakery and food manufacturing business, bringing the brand, distribution and expertise alongwith it. Alongside it is his mother’s family farm, a 20 acre smallholding where he breeds Gloucestershire Old Spot and Oxford Sandy and Black pigs, producing him 200 porkers a year for his two deli-cafés. Flocks of traditional East Anglian poultry such as Embden geese, white ducks and Ixworth chickens also range freely, pecking as they go.
The catering side of Stuart’s business encompasses two new deli-cafés as well as an outside catering arm taking his produce on the road to country fairs and food festivals such as Snape’s at the end of September. The first of his estimable Metfield Deli and Cafés is in Norwich’s Upper St Giles Street within the atmospheric setting of a converted Edwardian butcher’s shop. Snape has provided the second with his Metfield Café there, joined by the all new Deli opening up on Tuesday 31 March downstairs in the Maltings’ food hall selling direct all the wonderful foodstuffs Stuart and his chefs are serving every day. That means of course his toothsome pork pies, artisan breads, his farm reared meat cuts, charcuterie, ready meals, mostly British cheeses and Alder Carr ice creams alongwith local fruit and vegetables.
To understand his trademark cuisine, one has to grasp the ethos behind Stuart’s business. He has dedicated his career to understanding regional food, to promote native breeds and enthuse the public to eat seasonally (and locally whenever it’s good). Perhaps best summarised in ‘joining plough to plate’, Stuart’s furrow runs deep and looks like it will be a long one, such is his refreshing attitude to truly appreciating real food. That gastronomic learning curve is just as much about looking back to the grande dame authors of cookery’s yesteryear, flicking through the volumes from Eliza Acton or Hannah Glasse as gleaning from the likes of modern food heroes such as Fergus Henderson and Simon Hopkinson. He quotes Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England book as the most influential on his attitude to ingredients and how farming and terroir can influence their very flavours and textures. These give rise to regional specialities such as native meat breeds so no surprise to find Suffolk Red Poll beef and Norfolk Horn mutton on the menu. One culinary heroine Stuart talks of is Mrs Marshall, who was the Nigella of her day, even patenting an ice cream machine back in the late 1800s.
Very much in stark contrast to traditional ‘fine dining’ at Metfield Café it is far less constrained. If you want boiled eggs at soldiers at 3pm you can have it or the famous ploughman’s for breakfast – the brunch selection also covers indulgent muscovado porridge with sultanas; Lancashire rarebit with apple chutney; buttermilk pancakes, sausage and maple syrup; and grilled Yarmouth bloater. Come midday is when it starts buzzing, the lunch choice lending itself to communal grazing, ladies-who-lunch often sharing the gutsy earthy flavours on a selection of starter-sized plates from a typical choice of nine. But if three courses is more your thing, six choices for main and four for afters are on offer.
As the provenance of the ingredients is the backbone of the cooking, the dishes are understandably simple, complexity coming from the depth of flavour, perhaps just three or four elements on a plate, letting the quality and idiosyncracies of the foods sing out. Asking Stuart to choose a signature meal was never going to happen, such is his love of everything he cooks but he picked out a springtime showcase as starting with a warm salad of skate wing with sourdough croutons, capers, watercress and sherry vinaigrette, followed by pink griddled ox heart with purple sprouting broccoli, white beans, Berkswell shavings and a mustard dressing, ending with rhubarb posset and shortbread. Other menu highlights might include salt beef hash with fried egg or duck liver paste with toast and pickles for starters and roast Gloucestershire Old Spot pork belly with red cabbage and mash or grilled rabbit with wilted chicory and lentils. And make sure you leave room for decadent plum and almond tart with thick custard or proper Cheddar with whisky laced fruit cake perhaps.
Metfield Café and Deli at Snape Maltings
Snape near Aldeburgh T: 01728 688303
W: snapemaltings.co.uk
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